Qonductor: A Cloud Orchestrator for Quantum Computing

TL;DR

Qonductor is a cloud orchestrator that manages hybrid quantum-classical workloads, optimizing resource utilization and job completion times while balancing quality and efficiency in quantum cloud environments.

Contribution

It introduces a hardware-agnostic API and a hybrid scheduler that effectively manages quantum and classical resources in cloud settings, demonstrated through extensive real-world testing.

Findings

Achieves up to 54% reduction in job completion times

Increases quantum resource utilization by up to 66%

Scales effectively with system size and load

Abstract

We describe Qonductor, a cloud orchestrator for hybrid quantum-classical applications that run on heterogeneous hybrid resources. Qonductor abstracts away the complexity of hybrid programming and resource management by exposing the Qonductor API, a high-level and hardware-agnostic API. The resource estimator strategically balances quantum and classical resources to mitigate resource contention and the effects of hardware noise. The hybrid scheduler automates job scheduling on hybrid resources and balances the tradeoff between users' objectives of QoS and the cloud operator's objective of resource efficiency. We implement an open-source prototype and evaluate Qonductor using more than 7000 real quantum runs on the IBM quantum cloud to simulate real cloud workloads. Qonductor achieves up to 54% lower job completion times (JCTs) while sacrificing 3% execution quality, balances the load across QPU, which increases quantum resource utilization by up to 66%, and scales with growing system sizes and loads.